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A NEW SPECIES OF MEMNONIELLA
Citation:
Li, D., C. S. Yang, R A. Haugland, AND S J. Vesper. A NEW SPECIES OF MEMNONIELLA. MYCOTAXON 85(Jan-Mar):253-257, (2003).
Impact/Purpose:
To understand children's risks from exposure to molds in their environment and to explore risk management options for mitigating those risks.
Description:
A new species, Stachybotrys longistipitata sp. nov is described and illustrated. This fungus was originally isolated from forest soil in Japan and deposited as Memnoniella subsimplex.
Introduction
Four species have been described in the mitosporic genus Memnoniella Hvhnel: M. echinata (Rivolta) Galloway, M. levispora Subramanian, M. subsimplex (Cooke) Deighton, and M. zingiberis Rao. Members of this genus did not attract much attention until the health effects of indoor fungi, like Stachybotrys chartarum, became an issue. At that point, the similarities of these two genera in mycotoxin production (Jarvis et al. 1995) and growth on water saturated, cellulose based building materials demanded investigation of their phylogenetic relationship.
A comprehensive, comparative sequence analysis of species of Stachybotrys and Memnoniella lead Haugland et al. (2001) to consider these genera synonymous under the epithet Stachybotrys, as previously recognized by Smith (1962), Kendrick and Carmichael (1973) and Carmichael et al. (1980). However, one isolate, ATCC 22699 collected by T. Matsushima and deposited under the name of M. subsimplex, was found to be morphologically and genetically different from all described species of these genera (Haugland and Heckman, 1998; Haugland, et al. 2001). This isolate is described here as a new species of Stachybotrys.